Fast and furious' ambitious failure

By Dan Freedman

Updated 11:54 pm, Saturday, July 21, 2012

Photo: AP

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Attorney General Eric Holder speaks during a news conference in New Orleans, Thursday, June 28, 2012. The Obama administration and House Republicans refused to find a middle ground in a dispute over documents related to a botched gun-tracking operation, and the GOP plunged ahead with plans for precedent-setting votes Thursday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in civil and criminal contempt o Congress.

Attorney General Eric Holder speaks during a news conference in New Orleans, Thursday, June 28, 2012. The Obama administration and House Republicans refused to find a middle ground in a dispute over documents

WASHINGTON — The ATF's biggest adversary in Operation Fast and Furious was not the gun-wielding Mexican drug cartels, but rather the mismatch between its ambition to build major weapons-trafficking cases and the legal constraints undercutting that goal.

The tactic of linking U.S. gun purchases to Mexican drug kingpins came to be known derisively as “gun-walking.” It was born of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' frustration over laws that in effect confined investigations to low-level “straw purchasers” and the cartel-connected middlemen for whom they bought guns.

Enter Operation Fast and Furious.

Instead of arresting straw purchasers who bought military-style weapons in gun stores, Phoenix-based ATF agents followed instructions to let buyers go so weapons could be tracked to Mexican kingpins.

As a result, 2,000 or more weapons were smuggled into Mexico while ATF agents watched. Two of those weapons were found at the site in southern Arizona in December 2010 where Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot and killed.

ATF supervisors in Phoenix denied letting guns “walk,” but the damage was done.

Beneath the overheated rhetoric and finger-pointing is a cautionary tale of ATF enforcing gun laws with a bull's-eye on its back — a favorite target of the 4.3 million-member National Rifle Association, and numerous Republican (and some Democratic) lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

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A unit of the Justice Department, ATF hasn't had a permanent director since 2006. It fields a force of almost 2,500 agents — about the same number as in 1972.

ATF is responsible for policing a legally sold commodity backed by a ready army of enthusiasts quick to pounce over any hint of overzealous enforcement. Without a firearms trafficking statute that enables agents to build complex cases, ATF is limited to investigating straw purchasers for what amounts to paperwork violations and middlemen for dealing firearms without a license, also a wrist-slap.

Nevertheless, Justice Department officials exerted pressure on ATF to pursue bigger investigations to take down entire trafficking organizations, not just bit players.

Lanny Breuer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, dispatched a prosecutor to Phoenix to dust off dormant gun cases from the Bush administration that the U.S. attorney's office had shelved because they involved gun-walking.

Congressional investigators probing Fast and Furious theorize that renewed interest from Washington might have sent a signal to ATF's Phoenix agent in charge, Bill Newell, that President Barack Obama's Justice Department approved letting guns “walk” to see where they end up in Mexico.

By December 2009, agents had pinpointed 15 buyers supplying the notorious Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera.

In January 2010, Newell wrote that ATF's strategy in the case was to “allow the transfer of firearms to continue” so agents could identify the entire trafficking network.

A few weeks later, Fast and Furious won a coveted Justice Department designation as an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force case.

An ATF supervisor, David Voth, described the investigative architecture as “the biggest tool in our law enforcement tool box” and “the pinnacle of U.S. law enforcement techniques.”

While Newell, Voth and other ATF supervisors exulted in the prospect of linking weapons purchases to Mexican drug lords, some street agents feared they were enabling mayhem in Mexico.

Ultimately the whistle-blowers' complaints landed in the office of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

They testified before Congress that Voth and other ATF supervisors ordered them not to stop individuals under surveillance who were ferrying weapons to Mexico. Rather, agents were to record gun serial numbers in a database and then match the numbers to those off weapons recovered by Mexican authorities at crime scenes.

Newell has insisted that he never instructed agents to let weapons “walk.” Agents seized guns when there was sufficient evidence that the purchasers were illegally buying guns for cartel middlemen rather than legally for themselves, Newell has said.

In the face of a high legal threshold imposed by an “unusually conservative” U.S. attorney's office in Phoenix, Fast and Furious agents seized 375 guns in 2010, Newell said.

But emails turned over to Congress show a Phoenix-area firearms dealer anxious about selling to suspected straw purchasers.

ATF operated “as if cartels have a chief gun procurement officer and he orders 4,000 AKs (AK-47 rifles) from gun stores in Phoenix,” said one congressional investigator, who spoke on condition he not be identified. “That's not how it works. These are ad hoc networks of people who arise, come together and come apart in order to feed a market.”

As a result, the investigator said, ATF ended up focused on nonexistent trafficking structures when it should have concentrated on the deterrent effect of going after straw purchasers.

Ultimately, in January 2011, prosecutors unsealed indictments against 20 Fast and Furious defendants, none of them major players. ATF had targeted two cartel-connected associates, but they turned out to be “unindictable” FBI informants.